July 09, 2013
Source: Shutterstock
My suspicions were confirmed when I saw that, according to their profile, @UKChurchofSatan was following precisely 666 others on Twitter. Cute.
Their profile didn”t display the address of an official website, either. Not a good sign.
But I kept scrolling down. @UKChurchofSatan had sent out over 150 Tweets”wishing followers happy bank holiday weekends and re-Tweeting Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais”dating back through March.
It was legit.
Unlike messages regularly spewed out by the right and the left, the Church’s Tweets were models of old-fashioned decorum even when they were responding to critics, written in that anachronistic, typing-with-a-quill-pen style typical of earnest, fairly well-read males:
Why wouldn”t Satanism be pro-life? What else is there? We are all free to make choices. Agreeable or not. Everyone is entitled to choice.
At least in this online iteration, Satanism comes across as a kind of Goth objectivism but manages to express itself without the average Ayn Rand follower’s pompous, unearned sense of superiority.
Thanks to its disapproving July 3 Tweet, which was re-Tweeted over one hundred times and gleefully reported all over the Web and a few newspapers such as the Telegraph, the @UKChurchofSatan is getting lots of positive attention, much of it from a most unlikely source: conservative Christian bloggers in the US, who”ve joked that “Hail Satan!” would make a fine Democratic campaign slogan for the 2014 midterms.
The “Church” has duly Tweeted its appreciation:
A big thank you to all our new followers. It’s great to see and meet new people who take an individual view and approach on life!
And in the great “tradition” of Internet economics, they even took the opportunity to hawk some swag”a T-shirt emblazoned with a quotation by Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey:
It’s too bad that stupidity isn”t painful.
